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What's new: Short links to gift cards, generated via the API

With our June 2015 update you can now generate short links to gift card offers using the Giftbit RESTful API.

This allows you to deliver your gift card offers however you like: embedded in your own email, by text message, on social media, printed on direct mail, url redirect, etc.

You now have more flexibility in how gift card offers are delivered to your recipients. The short links point to a gift card offer page that is identical to our gift offer emails.

Why use short links?

By delivering your gift card incentives or rewards using short links, you are now able to offer gift cards in cases where Giftbit’s email delivery doesn’t make sense.

If your recipients are interacting with you inside an application, by text message, or on social media, you may not have their email address. It doesn’t make sense to ask for it just to deliver a gift card - now you can reward them through your own channels.

For researchers, sometimes asking for or sharing email addresses with a third-party is not possible due to a privacy policy or other restriction. By taking control of delivery, you are able to protect participant privacy while still getting the added benefits of tracking and money back.

In fact, short links create so much additional flexibility that we’re sure the most exciting integrations are those we haven’t even thought of yet. Our integrators continue to impress us with the innovative applications they have for our API.

Creating short links via the API

Gift offers are created the same way as before. You POST an API call with the necessary details--contacts, gift card brands, value, claim before date, etc--and just include delivery_type: ‘SHORTLINK’ in the call. Instead of email delivery, a short link will be created for each contact.

Furthermore, you don’t even need to include contacts; you can exclude contacts from the API call if you include link_count: ‘#’ instead. That # of short links will be created for you--no contacts necessary.

In either case, you can then retrieve your short links with a GET call to the /links endpoint using the corresponding campaign id.